Miskatonic Books

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Alien Life Found - on Earth!

Lovecraft spent much of his life coming to terms with the vastness of space and the mind boggling distances between stars. He coupled that with his earthly xenophobia, and came up with a number of new definitions for "alien".

As part of his legacy and part of his blog, we do occasional news bulletins on alien life. When we do go to the next planets, we will find life and since the laws of physics and chemistry seem to hold everywhere we look, planets should be filled with life.

I am more convinced than ever that "life" begins deep in the planet (most planets and moons) and percolates to the surface, should the surface environment allow this.

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ScienceDaily (Apr. 7, 2010) — Deep under the Mediterranean Sea, small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by 'poisonous' sulphides.

Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen.

Roberto Danovaro, from the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy, worked with a team of researchers to retrieve sediment samples from a deep hypersaline anoxic basin (DHABs) of the Mediterranean Sea and studied them for signs of life.

"These extreme environments," said Danovaro, "have been thought to be exclusively inhabited by viruses, Bacteria and Archaea. The bodies of multicellular animals have previously been discovered, but were thought to have sunk there from upper, oxygenated, waters. Our results indicate that the animals we recovered were alive. Some, in fact, also contained eggs."